Yes, it's true. I'm a stah! Dahling, dahling.

I'm going to be on TV this evening, on the public access cable show "Chess Now", hosted by my friend Phil. This morning I looked in the mirror and thought, "well, there's nothing I can do about that." And I wore my regular outfit of jeans and t-shirt, which is basically all I've got in my wardrobe. So it's  going to be just the regular me, only on TV. I have no idea what we'll talk about, but I imagine it'll have something to do with chess.

I have a long history of stage fright, by the way. In gradeschool I played a conglomeration of several characters in a production of "Johnny Tremain". When it was my turn to speak, I said my lines while strategically positioning myself behind the other people on stage.

In Junior High, I was walking through the hall, minding my own business, when a door suddenly burst open in front of me, and a bunch of other kids shouted out, "YOU!" They grabbed hold of me, and told me that I was going to be in their production of Macbeth in 3 days (a play I'd never read), and that I'd be playing a conglomeration of characters as determined by the director, a kid about my own age. Here was the book, heavily marked in pen with all the edits. My parents attended the performance, but to this day they deny ever having been there.

In High School I took an acting class, but there was one day when the teacher told us to pick a monologue to perform, specifically not something spoken by a musician on-stage, and I forgot that detail and picked something by Arlo Guthrie. So the teacher took up the entire class period with an extended humiliation exercise.

Another time in High School a few friends of mine were going to do a comedy show at a bar; but one of them bailed at the last minute. So my friends were like, "Zack! You're going to go on stage and do stand-up! PLEEEEEASE!!!!" So I went on stage, and I believe there was no laughter at any point during my routine. The most humiliating part, however, was when the mother of one of my friends told me afterwards, "I though you were pretty good," and I said, "really??" I mean, I knew I'd been the worst bomb that bar had probably ever seen. But still, someone throws me a little bone to mitigate the weight of eternal shame, and I just swallowed it whole. And as I was swallowing it, I thought to myself, "I just had the most pathetic response to someone throwing me a bone that I could possibly have had."

Occasionally I've been invited to professional conferences in my adulthood, and nowadays I just turn them down flat. You couldn't drag me into a panel discussion in front of people. Forget it! Thank you very much, I appreciate that there's possibly some money in it for me, but I'd rather just stay in my room listening to my latest recording of fingernails on chalkboards.

And here I am about to appear on "Chess Now". Why am I doing this? Well, partly it's because I like and trust Phil, partly because I've been playing chess all my life and have some interesting stories that may or may not come up during the show, partly it's because TV production is fascinating, and partly it's because it's possible that a future episode might be about another game I love and adore and created myself. So it's a mixture of various motivations that's brought me to the point of braving the waters of total humiliation yet again. Yay!